The Hunger: Swimming from Cuba to Florida

When Diana Nyad attempts the 103-mile swim from Cuba to Florida this summer, it will be her fourth try—and this time she'll be 62. Sound crazy? Maybe, but Nyad proves that even the most radical goals can sustain you

103 Miles To Go: Nyad training last year in the Atlantic Ocean for the Cuba–Florida swim that she will attempt again this summer.

When I first meet Diana Nyad, she's "not yet really in training" for the 103-mile swim from Cuba to Florida that she will attempt this summer. "Not yet really in training" meaning that when I find her in the far lap lane of the outdoor pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena, California, she is nearing the end of what's "just" a "relaxed" four-hour swim. Her freestyle stroke looks perfect, which is to say, it looks unremarkable; a stroke's magic, grace, and hurt belong in the private muffle of underwater.

Diana stops for a moment at the end of a lap to say hello. "Did you bring a swimsuit?" she asks. "The hot tub here has really great jets. You'll love it." With her girlish energy and raccoon-eye tan, she reminds me of a high school swimmer, which is a surprise. Diana is 62 years old. I had imagined someone more serious, who uses more sunscreen. Instead she is cheerful and chatty; she has a waterproof MP3 player so that she can listen to music during her workout, and, she explains, "The vibrations communicate directly with the bone of your skull, so that you can hear clearly underwater; people are geniuses with these things these days." Nine weeks prior to our meeting in November, Diana had been in anaphylactic shock and disoriented on the floor of a boat in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, suffering from respiratory distress after 37 hours of swimming—with two stings, at hours two and 26, from box jellyfish, whose venom is among the deadliest in the world—along the course of the Cuba–Florida swim that she is now looking forward to retrying.

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That someone can swim for days in open water is arguably more amazing than it is inspiring; it's an unfathomable feat, like a magician making an elephant disappear. But that one can, hour after hour, day after day, stay motivated and maintain an expansive spirit while training for a ludicrously difficult swim, with no certainty of success, well, that is inspiring. It makes one think, Maybe I really can work daily on my novel, make the 7:15 train, pick up my dry-cleaning, be nice to my mom…. Inspire, after all, comes from the Latin spirare, to breathe—the thing we do every few seconds, for all of our days.

In Greek mythology, a naiad is a water nymph. In the hot tub after her workout, when I ask about the odd aptness of her name, she laughs. "Because it's like destiny, right? My father, Aristotle Nyad, was a big talker about destiny, about fate; he was a Greek and liked to think of life as a Greek drama. In truth, my name is even more of a coincidence than it seems, because many years after childhood, I learned that Aristotle wasn't even my dad. I mean, he was my dad, in that he adopted and raised me, from age 2 to 14. But my biological father's last name was Sneed. Diana Sneed. Terrible." And how did you end up a swimmer? I ask. Why swimming in particular? "I was a kid in Florida, and there were swimming pools. That's all it was, really. Chance."

As Diana is talking, a young woman with zinc sunscreen on her face enters the tub. "I'm sorry to interrupt," she says to Diana, "but are you Diana Nyad? Maybe this is strange, but can I hug you?"

For weeks the question Diana has been fielding again and again—on her blog, on the street, in the press—is how she is handling the "failure" of her attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. The question doesn't seem to make much sense when you're standing next to her though. In the parking lot of the aquatic center, as we walk to her car, I ask Diana how she's feeling, referring maybe to the strained shoulder she told me about, or maybe to the four-hour workout she's just finished, or maybe to the 37 hours of her "failed" swim.

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"To be honest," she says, "since I took on this goal, I've been on a sort of high." When we get to the car, she puts ice packs on both shoulders so that she looks a bit like Goldie Hawn costumed as a football player; her short layers of strawberry blond hair are still damp. "I think I wasted a lot of time in the years before I had this goal," she explains as she drives out of Pasadena. "I mean, it's not that I'm a lazy person, it's not that I've been lying on the sofa, eating bonbons and watching TV. But I wasted so many hours on anxiety and regret. Hours thinking, Maybe I should have done this, or, Why did I do that? So many hours on those negative loops, you know? And then one day, it was shortly after my mother died, maybe I was more aware of time passing and getting older. I was actually right here in the car like we are now, driving, and I saw myself in the rearview mirror and thought, I should go back and do that swim. That swim from 30 years ago that I never completed. Then I had my goal. And I haven't wasted hours on regrets since then."

The "swim from 30 years ago"—her original attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida—took place in 1978, when Diana was 28 years old. She was already a record-holding distance swimmer. However, the swim from Cuba to Florida had never been done before. The waters swelled more than expected, often to six feet and sometimes even to eight feet, and the winds pushed Diana too far off course; 41 hours into the swim, but still 80 miles away from Key West, Diana had to climb aboard the boat and abandon the goal.

A year later, she set a world record that still stands today as the longest unassisted open-water swim—without a cage, wet suit, or flippers: 102 miles from North Bimini, Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Florida. "I touched that shore on my birthday. There I was, 30, and I said to myself: Okay, I did this, I feel really good, and now I don't want to ever swim another stroke again." And for about 30 years, she didn't. She played squash on the national level; she worked as a sports journalist and broadcaster; she started a fitness company. "I wasn't spending those years haunted by the failure of that old swim. That wasn't the way I thought of it. But when I needed a goal, that swim presented itself to me, naturally, like a story. To go back and finish what I'd started."

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A goal is arguably just a random something that is sufficiently far away. A caprice. But somehow, if taken seriously, if treated as fate, a goal can make an odyssey out of what would otherwise just be the small hours of life. One sets out to fulfill the prophecy no prophet ever professed, and the drama of how to get there from here makes meaning out of what might otherwise be just meanderings.

Shortly after Diana's sixtieth birthday, in August 2009, she returned to the pool, in part to find out if she could still swim. "I felt awful that first day back. I knew what it felt like to swim well, and I wasn't feeling it." But she built up her strength, at first swimming for just 25 to 30 minutes. Then adding 10 minutes, then another 10 minutes. "In early 2010, I set myself the goal of a six-and-a-half-hour swim. The water was cold. I hate cold water. And I managed to finish the swim anyhow. That's when I really knew, Okay, it's not crazy, I am physically up for this. I will be able to do it."

Christi Barli

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On August 5, 2011, meteorologist Dane Clark called Diana to say that favorable conditions had arrived. Summer was the only time warm enough to attempt the swim, but exactly when depended on the ideal combination of light winds, warm water, and good currents. (The year before, she had been ready to try, but the weather refused to cooperate. "I had been thinking and training for so long," says Diana about that missed chance. "I bawled like a baby, to be honest. Then I decided to focus on the next year.") Two days later, at 7:46 P.M., Diana entered the waters off Havana, ready to swim for about 60 straight hours. When I ask her how she could go for so many hours without sleeping, she laughs. "A lot of things are difficult when I'm out there, but it's never that I'm sleepy. Sleep isn't really something I find myself thinking about."

Extraordinary logistics, along with much of Diana's savings, went into the Cuba-to-Florida swim. Getting in shape was just one element. She aimed to hold to a pace of about 53 strokes a minute. She had a homemade electrolyte mix to help with the metabolic demand of around 700 calories an hour. Plans needed to be made for navigating the eastward pull of the powerful Gulf Stream, rigging up nutritional support, staying on course in dark waters, getting a license to travel to Cuba, scaring off sharks. As for jellyfish—well, there weren't supposed to be deadly box jellies in the Caribbean, so no worries there.

Through high sea swells and extreme shoulder pain, Diana held her pace. Fourteen hours out, a strong asthma attack set in. The team doctor swam out to administer inhalers. A few hours later, he swam out to administer oxygen. Diana kept going. Around hour 26, in the dark of night, 12 hours into an asthma attack still not abating, Diana found herself saying to her support team, "I'm just barely alive. Right now, I'm just barely alive." They pulled her out of the water.

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Key West, Florida, where Diana hopes to touch shore this summer, is an odd bird of a town. It was built up in the nineteenth century on sponging and wrecking: Sponging is trade in sea sponges, and wrecking is waiting on the shore for ships to wreck on the keys' shallow reefs, then treading out to save the lives of anyone left on the boat, which, once done, allowed one to rescue cargo and reap a finder's reward. Later Key West became an expensive resort town, host to many presidents, arts figures, birders, and retirees. In its park of ancestors, more than half of the commemorated heroes are described in their biographies as having arrived at Key West nearly drowned or simply washed ashore. One thinks of the shipwrecks of the Greek hero Odysseus and of how we admire him not so much for any one instance of cleverness or strength—evading Lotus-eaters and sirens and lovesick witches—but for the accumulated handling of 10 years of obstacles on his journey home.

The night before I flew out to meet Diana, I watched the boxing documentary When We Were Kings, about the legendary 1974 Zaire fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Ali had only recently resumed fighting after being banned and stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was 32 years old. Foreman was 25 and a champion. As you watch the two greats training, that Ali has no chance seems obvious. Even Ali's sparring partners repeatedly get the best of him.

On the day of the fight, Ali is not the dancing Ali to which his fans are accustomed. He leans against the ropes, his arms up in perpetual defense. Foreman gets in hit after hit. But as this is going on, Ali is talking. Is that all you've got, George? Is that all you can do? Even as Foreman is winning, he is getting visibly frustrated. The viewer starts to suspect that Ali's plan all along—what he was in training for, as he repeatedly got pummeled by sparring partners—was to become the guy who could take more hits than anyone else, who could take them and still stand. In round eight, far into Foreman's dominance and fatigue, Ali gets in one left hook. Then one follow-up right. Foreman is down. It's a knockout. The fight is over. Diana covered Ali a number of times in her reporting career. When many were saying he was mentally gone, late in his affliction with Parkinson's disease, she reported a piece that showed how his wit and intelligence were still there, beneath the shakes.

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"I think a serious 14-year-old can swim the way I do, can have my stroke," Diana says. "But the mental game is very hard in distance swimming." She says she keeps her mind on the swim by internally singing from a set list of songs she knows. But one imagines that the company of Neil Young and Bob Dylan alone can only do so much against the ocean, the classic symbol of vast, indifferent nature. Nature so vast and so indifferent that one reaches for something to give one a sense of scale, to help understand the endurance and accomplishment of Diana's being out in it for hour upon hour. The evening I fell asleep under the spell of the documentary, two mosquitoes made it into my tenth-floor apartment, which is just blocks from the apparently insufficiently toxic Lincoln Tunnel, even though it was November. That 0.002 ounce of nature made the night an unbearable torture of buzzing and biting. For 47 hours, Diana Nyad swam, I found myself thinking. A friend of mine who is a huge admirer of Diana's put it this way: "I can't do anything for that long. Not even sleep. And I have a two-year-old."

A month after the August 2011 swim, Diana and her team went out on another attempt. Just two hours offshore, she felt an overwhelming pain, like an electric shock—a powerful jellyfish sting. The presence of box jellyfish was in itself a surprise; research scientists had sighted them there for the first time only one year before. (Their emergence is hypothesized to be a symptom of global warming and maybe also of the shark population's decline.) After the sting, Diana continued for another 24 hours before she was stung again. Even then, she swam for another 11 hours before she finally stopped. "I remember thinking to myself, I'll get on the boat, get some care, and then I'll get back in the water and finish. It won't be an uninterrupted swim like I wanted, but I'll finish." In Diana's memory, she was on the boat for about six or seven minutes and then started to feel better. Her best friend, Bonnie Stoll, who was there as her main support, said Diana was passed out for hours, that she was shaking, that the boat was like an ICU. "I told Diana, 'If you want me to even think about going out with you to try this again, you need to sit down with me and watch some of the footage.' "

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"I was so upset when I got back home from that swim," Diana told me, "that I took all of the equipment we had and just set it out on the sidewalk for garbage collection. In my heart I think I knew that it wouldn't be picked up for a couple days yet. The next morning, I went back to the sidewalk and brought it all back in."

Soon after that swim, Diana and another friend treated themselves to a vacation in New England, where they stayed at a bed-and-breakfast. In the morning, when they sat down to eat among the other guests, the table discussion was about…Diana, whom they didn't recognize. One guest said she'd heard that Diana kept swimming with a broken leg. The young boy at the table contributed that he'd heard that Diana was really old, like, older than his grandmother. Diana and her friend remained quiet.

Back home in California, Diana was walking along a Malibu beach when she noticed that beneath the houses' porches were jars of blue liquid. She asked a guy what they were for. It's ammonia, for when you step on a jellyfish, he told her. He explained that, according to local lore, it would help. What's the lore, Diana asked, about what to do if someone gets stung while out swimming? "Well," he said, "then they get to shore as quickly as possible and pour ammonia on it." What if you're far offshore? "You just make it back to shore as quickly as you can." But what if you're really, really far offshore? she asked. "You mean if you're like a crazy Diana Nyad person or something?" he said. Yeah, she said. Like that.

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"Well," he said with a laugh, "there's really no plan for that case."

Diana's birth father—the un-eponymous Sneed, about whom she didn't learn until her forties—reportedly said after seeing his second child, "Another brown-eyed baby? I'm out of here." Diana's mother told him to yes, please go, and swore that his children would never know he existed.

Aristotle Nyad was a charismatic and erratic father figure. Diana remembers him disappearing for spells and often being in obscure trouble. But she also remembers him waking her at 3 a.m. to go see the moon in special phases; he read aloud to her all of (naturally!) The Odyssey. After age 14, she never saw him again. "You get older, and you find you forgive your parents, find you understand them better, and are not so mad at them anymore," she says. Because she had an absent father, her swim coach became an especially powerful figure. Later, she says, her coach sexually abused her, as well as other women who swam for him over the years. (Her coach was never charged, in part because the statute of limitations has run out; he denies all allegations.) "I think I used to swim from anger, but that's not where I am now," she says. Her brother, a schizophrenic, lives a mostly homeless existence in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In high school, Diana had been a hopeful in the 100-meter and 200-meter backstroke events for the 1968 Olympics, but she came down with a case of endocarditis and so missed the chance to even try out. As a freshman at Emory University, she and some friends put up flyers around campus to advertise that Diana would parachute out of her fourth-floor dormitory room. "It was going to be a feat. Something to do. I just went down to the local Army and Navy store to buy a parachute; I didn't know anything. And then the parachute didn't open." Somehow her only injury was bruised heels. However, the university took the stunt to be a suicide attempt and, times being what they were, kicked her out of school.

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"It wasn't a suicide attempt at all. But I was a mess, definitely. I was so upset about not being fit to try out for the Olympics. I didn't really understand yet that I was gay. Emory was a very Southern debutante school back then. I was the squarest peg in the roundest hole." Diana went back home to Fort Lauderdale, lived with her mom, and got a job working at a Howard Johnson. "I still remember coming home with all these coins as tips in my apron, and my mother sitting on the floor with me, cheerfully sorting them. She was so good to me through that time." I ask Diana what her mother had thought of her swimming. "She never was into the idea of my becoming so strong; that wasn't so ladylike in her mind, maybe. But I think she understood and respected really focusing on something. Later in life, she became a competitive ballroom dancer."

After finishing her bachelor's at Lake Forest College in 1973, Diana went on to a master's program in comparative literature at New York University. She also kept on swimming. Having missed an Olympic window, she became more involved in distance swims; in 1974, she set a women's world record in a race across the Bay of Naples.

Then Diana had another idea. "A friend of mine at school said to me, 'Why are these long swims all so far away, considering that almost three fourths of the globe is covered with water?' " Diana decided to try swimming around Manhattan. This had been done a few decades earlier by men but never by a woman. "I went down to the 79th Street Boat Basin to see if I could find someone with a boat to escort me," Diana recalls. "There were all these people there, sipping martinis and wearing sunglasses; those people all said no. Then I met this guy with no sunglasses, a run-down old boat, and a German Shepherd dog whose ribs were showing; I told him about what I wanted to do, that I was hoping to do the swim on Saturday. He told me that he had a 5 p.m. vet appointment, and did I think I could be done with my swim in time for that. I said, 'Yeah, I think I should be able to finish before then.' " The day of the swim, there were a helicopter and reporters, and they wanted to interview the guy on the boat. "There were a lot of delays. I asked him if he was okay with that. He told me not to worry, that he was having the time of his life." Diana's swim around the island, in under eight hours, remains a record.

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Diana and I took her dogs, Teddy and Scout, out for a sunset walk around her palm-tree-lined neighborhood. Los Angeles palm trees incline southward, making someone not accustomed to it feel off-kilter. "Maybe there's something I haven't thought of," she said in reference to her plan to try the Havana-to-Key West swim again this summer, "or maybe there'll be some new, never-before-heard-of algae that changes everything, but I feel like we've thought of everything now, we're prepared for everything, and I'm ready as a swimmer." She'll be wearing a swimsuit designed especially for her that covers most of her body and, she hopes, will protect her from jellyfish stings.

Diana's endurance seems grounded in myth and realism both; the attitude (one we might borrow) seems to be to expect that, of course, even the most radical goal can be met—it's fate!—all the while preparing for every potentiality, assuming that everything will be difficult, that most things go wrong. Being able to enjoy the split state of mind also seems essential. "Here we go…again!!!" wrote Diana to me recently, as she headed down to the Caribbean island of St. Martin to start very long training swims (9 to 15 hours) in open ocean waters.

Diana's triumphant 1975 swim around the island of Manhattan was—one forgets—preceded by a swim 11 days earlier in which she didn't make it around Manhattan, in which she had to get pulled out of the water, near Wall Street, after storm swells kept her from making progress on her route. Her swim from North Bimini that set a long-distance swim record was similarly preceded by a swim two weeks earlier that she was not able to complete. When she sets off from Havana this summer, it will be her fourth attempt. One thinks again of Odysseus: After 20 years, he finally makes it back to Ithaca. But even then his trials (and triumphs) are not yet over. There are still suitors to slay and a Penelope to reclaim.

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